Analysis of Asteroid Data Reveals Shortcut to Mars
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Astronomers have found a new route that could shave hundreds of days off a trip to Mars - potentially cutting round-trip travel time to under a year.
The distance between the Earth and the red planet changes constantly, depending on orbital position and velocity around the Sun. It’s the smallest when the Earth moves directly between the Sun and the neighbouring planet, a phenomenon that occurs roughly every 26 months and is known as the Mars opposition. It would take between seven and 10 months to travel this distance even with the fastest spacecraft available.
However the newly discovered corridor, which opens during a close approach between the planets, could cut the total mission time to just over 5 months - or 153 days, to be precise.
When space agencies plan planetary missions, they estimate optimal routes and fuel needs by looking at the trajectory data of planets. But the latest corridor was discovered by looking at orbital data from asteroids.
The finding, according to scientists, offers a new method to identify faster flight paths to other planets that traditional methods may miss. "This study presents a novel geometric screening methodology for rapid interplanetary mission design,” the researchers said in a new study published in the journal Acta Astronautica. "Maybe this can change the idea that we need more than two years to go to Mars and return," study author Marcelo de Oliveira Souza told Live Science.
Researchers hope future studies of the geometries of near-Earth asteroid paths can help in the rapid design of interplanetary missions.
Mars is, on average, roughly 225 million km (140 million miles) from Earth. Because both planets orbit the Sun at different speeds and distances, this gap changes, ranging from a closest approach of about 54.6 million km to a maximum distance of roughly 401 million km.
